A fascinating sports study with much wider-reaching application, featuring page-turning tales of personal triumph and cogent...
From the rugby pitch to the baseball diamond, a riveting analysis of greatness in sport.
Following the end of one of the greatest streaks in history, the Connecticut women’s basketball team’s 111 consecutive wins, comes a timely study of what made sports’ most successful teams so dominant. Walker (Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe, 2006), the founding editor of the Wall Street Journal’s daily sports coverage, admits that what propelled him into “this all-consuming project” was witnessing the “transformation” of the 2004 Boston Red Sox “from a half-assed bunch of jokers to legitimate contenders,” as well as his lifelong “ache to be part of a great team.” Diligently establishing the parameters of what sports he would and would not consider and the objective criteria used to analyze a team’s success, Walker arrived at a short list of “the top 10 percent of the top 1 percent of teams” from across the globe since the 1880s. In this illustrious company, the author includes recognizable groups such as the 1949-1953 New York Yankees, the only team in history to win the World Series five consecutive times, but also some unknown to U.S. readers—e.g., Espectaculares Morenas del Caribe (1991-2000) from Cuba, who won “every major women’s international volleyball tournament for ten straight years.” Though having had no expectation of finding a common denominator when he began scrutinizing what enabled these disparate paragons of victory to dominate their respective sports, Walker reached an intriguing conclusion: “the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it”—not the coach, the management, a franchise’s wealth, or overall talent. Combining statistics with epic stories from the playing field, Walker compellingly makes his case that captains possessing traits not usually assumed as shared among leaders are what make empires.
A fascinating sports study with much wider-reaching application, featuring page-turning tales of personal triumph and cogent analysis.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9719-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
A tedious case study of what can happen before, during, and after the shift of a desirable advertising account from one agency to another. In an effort to revive the company's flagging car sales, Subaru of America (SOA) put its sizable (albeit modest by auto- industry standards) account up for grabs during 1991. Drawing on the access granted him by SOA, Rothenberg (The Neoliberals, 1984) offers an exhaustive and ultimately exhausting rundown on a commercial mating dance. He also lards his fly-on-the-wall reportage with digressive takes on the history of big-league advertising and its dominant players. To some extent, these asides provide context for the author's evaluation of the work done by the survivor of SOA's screening process—Wieden & Kennedy, a so-called postmodernist shop based in Portland, Oreg., which made a name for itself as Nike's ad agency. Like many partnerships, the SOA/W&K alliance proved short-lived, contentious, and mutually frustrating. The association ended not with a bang but a whimper shortly after the agency's spots (duly approved by a Subaru management team that had been revamped in the interim) finished dead last in a USA Today survey of viewer reactions to commercials broadcast during the 1993 Super Bowl telecast. In reporting countless instances of high- stakes conflict and steering the episodic narrative up innumerable blind alleys, however, Rothenberg (who borrowed the book's title from an A.J. Liebling pensÇe on fortune) frequently loses track of his story. He doesn't even get around to detailing the background of SOA's Japanese owner (Fuji Heavy Industries) until near the end. As it happens, the parent organization's engineering-versus-styling bias informed many of the clashes over image that marked promotional debates at SOA during the early 1990s. Despite a few fine set pieces, this is an overlong, essentially pointless anecdote in which unsympathetic hucksters are pitted against one another—and the consuming public.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41227-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Another work of Boston sports hagiography from one of the jock beat's leading home teamers. For nearly 40 years, Arnold ``Red'' Auerbach ran the show, trademark cigar in hand, for the emerald-clad Boston Celtics. Serving as coach from 1950 to 1966, then as general manager and unopposed despot until 1990 or so (he is still on the payroll as a consultant), Red guided the Hub's beloved Jolly Green Giants to 16 NBA championships, including an amazing streak of titles running from 195966. So successful was the team that Auerbach's effective coaching and astute talent assessment—he acquired many of the game's greatest players, including Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, and Larry Bird (who wrote the book's foreword)—were dismissed by foes as ``The Celtics Mystique.'' During Red's time at the top, the NBA grew from a barnstorming curiosity to a multi- billion-dollar global enterprise, and it would be hard to overstate his influence on the game—but Shaughnessy (The Curse of the Bambino, 1990) very nearly succeeds. While he does show Auerbach's cantankerous and occasionally pig-headed side, the author essentially presents to readers little more than a mash note loaded with anecdotes about Red's cigar-chompin', ref-baitin', hell- drivin' virtuosity. Not merely a great x's and o's guy (the NBA annually presents the Red Auerbach award to its outstanding coach), he is in Shaughnessy's presentation basketball's Moses, the man who led the game out of darkness. Non-Celtics fans might want to skim many passages to get to the parts where Red sagely catalogues the game's changes—for example, his observation that ballplayers ``used to come to practice with gym bags; now they come with attachÇ cases.'' At 77, Red has slowed a bit: He's no longer the preeminent judge of talent, and he's down to two or three stogies a day. But as long as guys like Shaughnessy can hold a pen, it's always Red's game; anyone else just came to play. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59680-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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